DAY 72 THURSDAY JUNE 4 - CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION AND A WATERFALL

Today is a bank holiday in Austria and that was obvious as we walked into town early. All the shops were shut and there were more bicycles than cars on the road.  We went to the Catholic Church where we had been told a procession would take place at 9:30am.  There were a few people around at 9:15 and a small altar was set up in the square.

At 9:50 the doors opened and people came out and lined up ready for a procession.  There were men with Tyrolean dress: feathered hat, grey jacket, long socks, black Hosen.

 There were women in traditional dress.

There were children in choir robes

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There were teenagers carrying banners and statues.

There were men shading the Pfarrer.

Finally, there were men carrying rifles, which they fired from time to time as the procession moved about the town.  Every time they fired the echoes returned from the surrounding mountains for up to 10 seconds.

When they returned they held a mass of sorts in the square, where several hundred people could be seen.

Is there a special Catholic Festival on June 4?  We found out it was Corpus Christi or Body of Christ as present in the Eucharist.  It was very exciting and colourful to watch.

After a pleasant morning tea of Schwarzwaldertorte in a nearby cafe, we boarded a coach for our booked tour to Krimmler Waterfall.   We have seen plenty of waterfalls in our trips around Australia:  Jim Jim, Twin, Mitchell and this one was at least as impressive.  At 380 meters total fall it is the fifth highest in the world.

It falls in three sections and we climbed to each of them with eleven lookouts along the way. There were hundreds of people of all ages climbing.

These are the rapids that we found at the top.  They are fed by the melting glaciers above 2000 meters.

We pushed ourselves to get up and back in two hours realising this was good training for the Milford Track next February.

At the entrance to the Krimmler National Park a wood sculpture was animated by a water wheel.  We should have used this idea for sawing up our logs.  It is a water powered bush saw.

 The bus stopped at a lookout coming home to give us the complete picture.